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WHERE DECONSTRUCTION BEGINS

I was moved by the generosity and intelligence of Mark C. Taylor's essay on deconstruction as an ''extended critique of the modern philosophy of the subject'' based on humanism. That essay strengthened my respect for the prophetic qualities of a novel that Mr. Taylor does not mention, E. M. Forster's ''Passage to India,'' published in 1924 - to my mind, one of the major works of our uncertain century. Much of what he says applies to that novel with as much force as it applies to deconstruction and its antecedents. I have the feeling that what spoke to Mrs. Moore in the nothingness of the cave - something ancient, ''the undying worm itself,'' the echo that coils around the walls, denying value to ''poor little talkative Christianity'' and reason alike by making everything so equal that discriminations are impossible - has since spoken to our general Western culture. To Fielding, the protagonist of that novel (and his name obviously echoes against that of the 18th-century novelist, who also believed in tolerance and the efficacy of reason), ''everything echoes now,'' just as it echoes to the followers of Mr. Derrida, huddled along with the rest of us in our cultural cave. It is remarkable that ''A Passage to India'' encompasses despair rather than becoming a victim of it, no doubt because Forster - inheritor of the traditions of rational humanism though he was - intuitively responded to the insights of Eastern metaphysics. I know of no other novel so aware of the ''unsayable'' while yet being capable of using language to imply it.

Though I am sure they would deny it, those most fully drawn to theories of deconstruction must be separated by only the thinnest of lines from Buddhism or Hinduism. I suspect it is the Western humanism they decry that prevents them from acknowledging their affinity with Eastern metaphysics and (perhaps) Neoplatonism, but I'll like them better, finding their insights more a help than a hindrance to the future of our race, once they acknowledge, and respond to, the connection. - JAMES MCCONKEY - Trumansburg, N.Y.

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A version of this letter appears in print on February 22, 1987, on Page 7007038 of the National edition with the headline: WHERE DECONSTRUCTION BEGINS. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe